Ver. 3. — Know ye not, that so many of was were baptized into Jesus Christ, were baptized into His death?
In the verse before us, the Apostle proves that Christians are dead to sin, because they died with Christ. The rite of baptism exhibits Christians as dying, as buried, and as risen with Christ. Know ye not. — He refers to what he is now declaring as a thing well known to those whom he addresses. Baptized into Jesus Christ. — By faith believers are made one with Christ: they become members of His body. This oneness is represented emblematically by baptism. Baptized into His death. — In baptism, they are also represented as dying with Christ. This rite, then, proceeds on the fact that they have died with Him who bore their sins. Thus the satisfaction rendered to the justice of God by Him, is a satisfaction from them, as they are constituent parts of His body. The believer is one with Christ as truly as he was one with Adam — he dies with Christ as truly as he died with Adam. Christ’s righteousness is his as truly as Adam’s sin was his. By a Divine constitution, all Adam’s posterity are one with him, and so his first sin is really and truly theirs. By a similar Divine constitution, all Christ’s people are one with Him, and His obedience is as truly theirs as if they had yielded it, and His death as if they had suffered it. When it is said that Christians have died with Christ, there is no more figure than when it is said that they have died in Adam...Ver. 4. — Therefore we are buried with him baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.
The death of Christ was the means by which sin was destroyed, and His burial the proof of the reality of His death. Christians are therefore represented as buried with Him by baptism into His death, in token that they really died with Him; and if buried with Him, it is not that they shall remain in the grave, but that, as Christ arose from the dead, they should also rise. Their baptism, then, is the figure of their complete deliverance from the guilt of sin, signifying that God places to their account the death of Christ as their own death: it is also a figure of their purification and resurrection for the service of God.
Jack, was Haldane a baptist? I know there were two brothers.
ReplyDeleteMy understanding is that both brothers, though originally presbyterian, eventually adopted a congregationalist polity and baptistic practice.
ReplyDeleteBut Haldane, like most people, does have a paragraph on Romans 6 in which he indicates that he thinks that "baptism" has something to do with "water" and symbolism. I deny that there is any such reference to water (or even to the baptism with the Holy Spirit) in Romans 6. The baptism of Romans 6 is one where all the objects of baptism are saved from wrath of God by being legally identified with Christ's death. Haldane does a wonderful job of describing the "one death", not as our daily dying, but the same as Christ's death under law once for all time.
ReplyDeleteRomans 6 is about Christ the public representative of the elect first being under condemnation, being under sin and death. Romans 6:7 “For one who has died has been justified from sin. 8 Now since we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. 9 We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death NO LONGER has dominion over him. 10 For the death he died HE DIED TO SIN once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God.
Christ was never under grace and is still not under grace. Christ was under the law because of the imputed sins of the elect. Romans 6 is about Christ’s condemnation by the law and His death as satisfaction of that law. Christ after His resurrection is no longer "under law". Christ’s elect, after their legal identification IN TIME with Christ’s death, are also no longer "under law".
The death of the justified elect is the SAME legal death that Christ died. The “definitive resurrection” of the elect in Romans 6 is the result of being set apart with Christ (and His death) from being under law.
Christ was never under the power of sin in the sense of being unable not to sin. Christ was always unable to sin. The only way Christ was ever under the power of sin is by being under the guilt of sin. The guilt of the elect’s sin was legally transferred by God to Christ. Christ’s death to sin was death to the guilt of sin, and since the elect are IN TIME united with His death, the death of the elect is also a death to the guilt of sin. Romans 6:7: “For one who has died has been justified from sin.”